5050

All very interesting. I remember the ads in Meccano Magazine and asking my Mum if I could have one. I think she put me off by saying they would be to difficult for me to make. In retrospect I reckon she was right! With 'modern technology' (ie computers!) I suppose it would be possible to enlarge the scale to make them somewhat easier to build? Possibly after laminating the paper print onto thin card? I might stand a chance then.............🙂

Fancy meeting 'Geoffrey' here🙂. I'm sure you must remember him Gordon after all the happy hours spent with him on 'Enigma Engineering'!

Iain, along with Mike Sharman, was a great influence on me as well. I cannot think of anything he wrote that was in any way boring or staid. In fact, his style of writing must have influenced me in my writings. His flowing, chatty and light-hearted approach belied the practical, common sense - and above all - interesting content. In addition, I worked out that by writing in this style, not only did it become more readable but it also resulted in an enhanced payment cheque due to the extended word count. Thank you Iain on so many counts, you will be greatly missed by the hobby as a whole.* *Both parts I sincerely hope! (see above.....)

And here are the details in glorious technicolour! There'll be LOTS of top quality pre-owned items for sale. Grab yourself a bargain! Or two - or 3 etc.

I'm there with my American switching puzzle layout 'Peforia Narrows' Come along and have a go. It's not TO difficult...............................😀

This is my Kingdom Barclayas finished some years ago. The chimney is really to tall but the kit one was, to put it politely - no blinkin' good! Soon after the photo was taken it went into the Ruston paintshops for a light weathering. And this is my version of the chassis. High Level gearbox and Mashima motor with Gibson wheels.

With a vertical motor in the cab and a gear train it sounds very like the DJH loco. I have one that I converted to P4 with Alan Gibson wheels and it runs very well.

I built one of these a few years ago and the experience was duly noted in a thread. Might come up with a search but the photos probably won't. It was not one of the easier kits I've built (understatement........) but the chassis turned out OK and it is a good runner with all that weight..

Wheels could be Cimco perhaps? Similar fixing to Romfords but possibly a bit finer. Interesting concept, securing the footplate to the frames but I wonder if the builder considered having to remove the wheels at a future date. He must have fastened the footplate to the chassis with the wheels in place.

A quick updatei to say that last evening I had the loco running and hauling a train on a friend's continuous run layout. It ran very well and smoothly - thankfully! I've also now purchased some paint that I hope will be OK for colour and hope to start painting very soon. I have a backlog of painting projects to be getting on with and now some better weather has come for spraying I hope to be getting on with them.

It's supposedly based on a LSWR G6 loco. The bits I've used all came from my odds and sods collection. No credit card was harmed during the construction of this loco. Apart from the initial purchase of the body from a 'pre-owned junk box' at a show some years ago and that was a minimal cash payment. Now, lets get back to Craig🙂

You may not be to impressed with this then...................... Sorry...............................................

Oh they were impressed! I was meaning my memory of it being the L1 could be suspect. I'm sure it was the L1 'cos, as I was also impressed, I insisted on having one for Christmas that year. Spoilt brat...............................😁

I remember it being the L1, Railway Modeller was highly impressed. But I could be wrong...........................

Just checking why there is a shortage of replies and realised the photo I posted has gone with all the others. Here it is again - All replies will be gratefully received!

I use 3-link on all my stock - but my layouts tend to be small. The best idea is - as someone has already said - to fit an iron wire bottom link ONLY (Smiths sell them I believe, i have some EM Society ones) and use a small magnet to lift the 'chain' onto and off the hook. I magnetise an old pointed or curved needle file for this by rubbing it on a larger magnet occasionally. Even in P4 I use the Smiths hooks as they are a sensible size and shape. I do still have some of my earlier wagons with more 'scale sized' hooks and, especially nowadays with aging eyesight, I find them trickier to couple - but by no means impossible..

It's exotic with Tennessee Honey..................................🤪

An old friend turned up yesterday with this little lot. It had belonged to his sister-in-law's father who passed away recently. It was found in a box in the loft (along with a large collection of railway tickets which were binned/recycled as they were only a load of bits of cardboard...............). As well as the items shown there are a further 6 points making 10 in total and a quantity of plain track and a load of connectors. Any idea of a rough value these days? Several of the items are boxed and in quite good condition. Some paperwork is included and a couple of packs of lamps and a key. There was a train set box but it had deteriorated to such an extent that it also was 'recycled'. Any monies raised from a sale will go to the Lynton and Barnstaple Railway which my friend is a long term member of.

In a fit of mental awareness I realised that, although the worm and gear are a 'set' (ie - they've been together for a while in a previous incarnation) they may not be in the same 'orientation' due to the gear wheel being turned in the gearbox during re-assembly. I therefore removed the worm and refitted it the other way round - and it now seems to run appreciably better and slightly less noisily. Compared to modern gearing from High Level, Romford gears (and brass ones in general) tend to be more noisy anyway so anything is an improvement! In an exhibition a lot of the noise tends to disappear into the general background noise so I'm not to bothered overall.

Doing all that would mean having to dismantle the existing gearing therefore having to remove the wheels from the axle. Once they've been fitted and then removed, in my experience, they never go back on securely and can readily slip. I know there are 'methods' supposed to overcome this but I've never managed to get them to work. It would also mean having to buy something new and the project is based on using up bits and pieces already 'in stock'. I reckon that an extended period of running would improve matters - but I currently don't have a suitable layout on which to do this. A bit more 'bench running' is all I can manage at present.

The saga continues! Plenty of work has been occuring over the last couple of weeks, some of it positive, some rather negative. This has definitely been a '3 steps forward, 2 steps back' affair! The new parts were Araldited in place with the body orientated to allow gravity to do its job. Firebox wrapper was attached separately and then front bufferbeam, cab front and smokebox door. Next was rear bufferbeam and cab back. Real Araldite was used for all of them. The short length of tube projecting from the smokbox door is for the handwheel to be attached. Rear bufferbeam with hook soldered on. The tail fits into a slot cut into the beam and will be well filled with Araldite. A similar slot was also cut into the front. I had made up some coal rails for the bunker top to avoid having to carve to much of the cast 'coal' away. They are made up from some scraps of Evergreen 'siding', thinned around the top. Cab roof and most of the boiler fittings now attached along with some nickel silver strips along the top edges of the tanks. This is an attempt to tidy up yet another 'distressed' area of the casting. Handrails are still to be fitted down from these strips into the footplate at the front of the tanks and also onto the boiler. The steps were cleaned up a bit and a fourth one made up from some brass scraps. Here it is nearing completion with only a couple of whistles to be fitted to the cab roof. Buffers are a bit of an anachronism as they are actually BR Oleo ones intended for main line diesels but I have several sets and I wanted buffers of a reasonably large diameter. Their bases are squares of plasticard. Handwheel is attached to the smokebox door and handrails are fitted all round. In the spirit of only using 'stuff from stock' the ones on the side of the smokebox are from an Airfix 14xx that was detailed some time ago. There are also some tanks vents filed up from some whitemetal oddments I found in my stash. It looks quite 'purposeful' - but it didn't translate that into performance sadly. The chassis on its own was a bit jerky and occasionally just stopped for no apparent reason. With the gear wheel unscrewed from the axle it was free running when pushed by hand but I stilI checked all the coupling rod and crankpin 'interfaces' and treated them to a very mild and gentle broaching but there was little improvement under power. Fitting the body meant that the power uptake was a lot higher than the chassis alone so I reckoned the motor may have been at fault. I swopped one DS10 motor for another but there was little improvement. A bigger motor was probably needed with a bit more guts - but it would have to fit into the DS10 etched mount that was fitted. I wasn't prepared to remove the wheels (they never go back on right) to fit another type (such as a High Level - which would also have meant BUYING something new!!) so I tried motors (mainly Sagami cans) out of my stash and none of them - apart from an Anchoridge D11 - appeared even remotely possible. However, the D11 has fixing holes along its underside to attach to spacers and the DS10 etched 'gearbox' has them at the front above and below the shaft. The DS10 shaft (and therefore the worm gear) is 1.5mm and the D11 is 2mm. I bit the bullet and turned up an 'adaptor' to allow the D11 to fit, soldering it to the front of the motor with Carr's 100 degree low melt to try and avoid over heating the motor parts. As I didn't have a Romford worm with a 2mm bore for the gear ratio in use I bit another bullet and drilled the 1.5mm one out to 2mm on the lathe. Thankfully it appears to have worked OK! The adaptor has 2 x 10BA threaded holes top and bottom to attach to the gearbox but I have found that only the top one is required - and the bottom one is very difficult to fit in practice. To enable the D11 to fit I had to shorten the shaft (using diamond files) and remove the brake shoe cross wire and the original motor support spacer. The rear of the motor now rests on the middle brake cross wire and is padded with small pieces of sticky back foam. Another piece of this is stuck to the top of the motor as packing against the inside of the body shell. Only one brush is insulated on the D11 motor so one pickup wire is soldered to the insulated brush and the other is soldered to a convenient place on the chassis (the rear spacer). So far it runs a lot better with this motor than before but it still isn't as good as a can motor with HL box - but then it's all made from bits and pieces I had 'in stock' so all I've lost is some hair from when things didn't go exactly as 'planned' (if anything ever really was!). Now for painting. I've got an idea of the shade of Green I would like it to be and I might go and have a look in Games Workshop as I've had some very good opinions given on their paint quality. Might be a while before it gets its paint, probably when to weather dries up somewhat! EDIT - a duplication of photos has occurred - but the duplicate refuses to be dispensed with! So, here you are, have another look for free!

Listing ended now - "something was wrong".

Work has continued, a little slowly at times, but there is progress. First I thought I should show the amount of metal I've finally removed from the underside of the body. The white plastic piece at the rear is a 'tongue' for the rear spacer to fit under. It is the same width as the inside of the frames to hold them in proper alignment, the front having a screw fixing into the body. When looking at the body as a whole I realised how bad it is in place with dents and scratches all over. I decided to try and tidy it up a bit with some thin brass overlays from 10thou sheet as follows. First was the front spectacle/cab front plate. The cast cab windows are very poor and 'deep' so I enlarged them with a scalpel and filed up a piece of the brass to fit. The window surrounds are from a Mainly Trains (Wizard) etch. They were soldered in place and look much better than the casting. The same was done with the rear of the cab but here I had to hack away some of the cast 'coal' to get a good fit. And with the proposed cab roof in place. I had seen on Barclay's thread that he had made and fitted a rivetted wrapper for the smokebox. The edges of my smokebox are rather 'distressed' so I thought I would have a go at making one myself. I made a template from paper and transferred the shape onto the brass. Rivets were marked out along the edges (nothing scientific, I just spaced them as I thought fit!) using an old gramophone needle in a pin-chuck and gently tapped with a small hammer on my cutting mat. The buffer beams are also a bit 'rough' so, after looking through my books I decided to make a pair of beams as well. I had a length of brass which was the depth I wanted so I soldered a length of wire along one edge to represent the edge of the footplate. The cast edge was filed away on the body. Holes were marked and drilled for buffers (more on these some time later), indents sawn out at the ends and a coupling plate from an old etch soldered on. The wire was filed flat and 'square' to appear more like a sheet metal edge. Rivet heads were embossed in strategic places as for the smokebox wrapper. (Checking the posted photos I realise I've missed a row on the right hand edge of the top beam!) I've also found some items to use for the bits I was missing such as steps and tank fillers. Trouble is there were only 3 steps and 1 tank filler! I've made replicas of these and the tank filler(s) are here. It is made using plasticard of varying thicknes with a lot of patient and careful filing to get the right shape. It's not perfect but once it's fitted and painted I doubt it will notice. The chassis has also been painted and needs reassembly. Next main job will be sticking all these bits above in place (plus the chimney, dome and safety valves) along with fabricating a couple of more 'add-ons' I've thought about. 'Proper' Araldite will be the glue of choice - so it will take a couple of days or so for all of them to be attached. The next photo should have been place further up the post but it shows the Mainly Trains etch with the front spectacle plate. A very useful bit of etching!

Yes, Stewart Reidpath I would presume, one of the early proponents of small scale (ie 3.5 and/or 4mm) modelling before the war and who lasted into the 50's at least. Probably info. on them in the Collectable/Vintage section on here.

Well, that's my excuse reason for not having one then!